One expert in dental sedation says the majority of issues that arise when a patient is sedated for dental work are preventable.

CEO of Sea to Sky Dental-ed in Vancouver, Michael Dare was in Edmonton Friday speaking to dentists about sedation.

His company trains dentists in safe sedation and he said, the majority of cases are preventable because patients usually aren’t monitored properly.

“Due to a variety of factors, possibly college regulations being inadequate in some jurisdictions, possibly issues with training. Also issues with ongoing training and the maintenance of competencies we have these scattered incidents where people are being inadequately monitored.”

He said one thing that needs to change, particularly in Alberta and Ontario, is the bar for safety needs to be set as high as the medical profession.

“The big thing in medicine is that in medical anesthesiology it is forbidden at those levels of anesthesia to ever be both the surgeon and the anesthes, and other people in your medical profession here in Alberta have commented on that. That this practice does not occur in medicine and it cannot occur any differently in dentistry.”

In Alberta and Ontario the same person can perform the dental work and sedate patients.

Dare said along with improper patient monitoring, he told the group emergency response is also inadequate.

“And I said to them, I don’t expect it to be adequate at the beginning, you never do this. No dentist sits there having emergency’s all the time. So you should be extremely well organized, your equipment should be organized, your staff should be organized. It’s not going to go well, you don’t do it so why would it? So you better be ready.”

Dares comments came less than two months after a four-year old girl in Edmonton slipped into a coma during dental work.